New Haven resident Melvin Poindexter waited two years to be selected for a low-mortgage home through nonprofit Neighborhood Housing Services (NHS).
Poindexter said he reached out to the organization after witnessing one of his relatives successfully purchase a home through the program.
Poindexter’s future home will be one of four affordable homes constructed on Hazel Street as part of a neighborhood revitalization effort in New Haven, under the Housing Clinic, a partnership between the state Department of Housing (DOH) and Yale University.
The two-family homes will provide homeownership opportunities for four families, who will not only have a new home but they will also have passive income in the form of a rental unit.
Poindexter said he is looking forward to that added benefit.
“The process of renting out the others [apartments], giving others an opportunity to have some way to housing,” Poindexter said.
The Housing Clinic involves students in Yale’s Urban Design Workshop, which is part of the Yale School of Architecture, Yale Law School and the Yale School of Management, according to DOH Commissioner Seila Mosquera-Bruno.
Mosquera-Bruno plans to expand the partnership to bring similar housing and urban revitalization efforts to other communities.
“We're going to do a couple more of these projects to ensure that we bring those investments into the neighborhood where they really need it,” Mosquera-Bruno said.
The Hazel Street development is the first constructed under the Housing Clinic, which formed in 2022. The four, two-family homes were funded with $3.5 million in state funding, including $2.6 million for the homes and another $900,000 for retrofitting the neighborhood’s energy infrastructure.
“It's not just about the eight units that will be built here,” Mosquera-Bruno said. “It’s also about what else is going to happen in this community.”
The Windsor-based nonprofit Efficiency for All is overseeing the project’s energy efficiency and the area’s energy retrofitting.
“We will select 30 homes, after completing energy assessments, that will receive deeper energy retrofits such as air sealing insulation and potentially items like heat pumps or new windows,” Efficiency for All founder Leticia Colon De Meijas said. “Our goal is to draw down energy demand and raise and inspire the people of the community to help empower them to make the right housing and energy choices.”
The future homeowners have already been selected, and mortgages will be secured closer to move-in day.
Construction should be complete within six to eight months, according to NHS Executive Director Jim Paley.
